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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A GREEN WEB HOST! WOW!

As an intern for WOW! I want to share a woman-run success story. My web host is DrakNet, and they’ve made an amazing announcement I’d like to share:

We wanted to send out this special announcement that as of today, DrakNet is now 100% Carbon Neutral, and you can now brag that your website is truly green.

DrakNet now purchases Green Tags monthly for the amount of energy that is used to run the servers, lights, etc. Green Certificates (also known as Green Tags) are a simple way to offset the use of carbon-based energy sources and effectively power a business (or your home) on 100% renewable energy resources, without changing electricity providers.

We have chosen to purchase Green Tags for 110% of our carbon footprint, for 100% solar power. What this means is that for any energy DrakNet uses in our operations, that same amount of energy (+10% in case our calculations are incorrect) will be pumped back into the grid from solar power generation, essentially "cleaning" the energy, neutralizing our negative effect on the earth, and allowing us to claim to be "solar powered" and "green".

DrakNet struggled for several years between our energy consumption, and service - there are solar hosts in a few solar data centers. The pricing, however, both for shared and dedicated servers is no where near economical and would effectively negate the pricing structure our clients have come to rely on, and their reliability is not yet up to the par of a world class data center.

By purchasing certified green certificates (or green tags), we have been able to negate our power hungry servers and make sure that our impact on the earth is neutralized.

We look forward to the day when solar energy data centers offer as much value as power hungry data centers - and when they do, we will be there.

What are Green Certificates, or Green Tags?* (written by mainegreenpower.org) . . .

Hosting with a mission...DrakNet specializes in hosting for progressive sites, and we actively support non-profit organizations within our community in a multitude of areas - technological, humanitarian, spiritual, educational, political, and environmental to name a few. We currently offer discounted hosting to non-profit community groups, and believe that through sponsored hosting, we can be pro-active in helping to make our world a better, kinder and safer place.

Female Owned BusinessDrakNet is owned and operated by a woman, a feat considered almost as rare in this industry as running Windows for a year solid without having to reinstall anything. Flanked by big, burly geek men this enables us to not only provide comforting sympathy when things go wrong, but the power to wrestle ornery technology into submission in confrontations between man and machine. _________________

I’ve used DrakNet as a host since I put up my tarot reading site in the late 90s and without fail, the Ladies at ‘Drak’ have been there for me. If I’ve lost a password, have a question about software or am so confused I don’t know what question to ask, Jen at DrakNet gets back to me in a timely and patient way. When I needed to put up a second site, I never even considered looking anywhere else for a hosting service.

Going Green is frosting on a cake that was already sweet. I haven’t changed my sites to indicate their new Green status but I do know that when I do, DrakNet is going to be right there for me if I have any problems.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Going Green

In light of Chynna's hilarious post on how to annoy prospective editors and provide solid craft tips, I hope to do the same next week...

But today's post I reserved for a new company. Have you heard of the new way to "go green" with regard to books? Here's a letter we recently received:

My name is Raz Godelnik and I thought WOW! readers might be interested to learn about Eco-Libris , a new green biz I co-founded that lets book readers balance out the paper used for the books they read by planting trees. An interesting fact is that although balancing out books is relevant for both men and women, we received so far much more attention from women. So without further delay, here's an introduction to Eco-Libris:

About 20 Million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. What we want to do is to raise awareness to the destructive environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provide people with an affordable and easy way to do something about it.

The process itself is fairly simple - upon entering our website (http://www.ecolibris.net/), customers decide how many books they would like to balance out. They then pay for it online and a tree is planted for each of these books. Customers also receive a sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out saying "One Tree Planted for this Book." They can later display these stickers on their books' sleeves. In the few days that we have been online we already had people from all over the world balancing out their books and planting trees. The feedback so far is very encouraging.

We have partnered with three highly respected US and UK registered non-profit organizations that work in collaboration with local communities in developing countries to plant the trees. These trees are planted in high ecological and sustainable standards in Latin America and Africa, where deforestation is a crucial problem, and planting trees not only helps to fight climate change and conserve soil and water, but also benefits many local people, for whom these trees offer many benefits and an opportunity for a better future.

Eventually and hopefully sooner than later, books will be made from recycled paper or other eco-friendly materials and logging for paper will stop. On that day we'll happily move on to a new cause, but until then we think every book reader should take action. We also don't forget the responsibility of the book publishing industry to the current situation and we intend to become a strong voice in a call for change towards printing books in an eco-friendly manner.

Like any new green business we try to spread the word about us to all the greenies, book lovers, and everyone in between. If you could feature us at your site that really would be great! I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thanks!